Wallstreet Not Booting

I recently got this really nice Wallstreet. It's a 466mhz G3 (Powerlogix upgrade chip), 512MB RAM and a recently wiped 20GB HD. At any rate it's a very nice machine and I hope I get it working.

So today I borrowed a yo-yo and tried to boot it up I was met by a Floppy disk with a question mark, different from the typical folder with a question mark. Ok, this shouldn't be too hard. I just try booting holding down C and well...get nothing. I hear the CD drive churning away but alas, nothing.

I try a OS9 CD and OSX Jaguar and neither of them do anything.

The thing gets into open firmware just fine but it just can't seem to boot an OS. Any suggestions?

Well luckily I have a 4gb drive from my old lombard that has Panther already on it and I'm trying that in the machine right now and I'm getting nothing but a white screen. I guess I'll have to try the 233mhz chip that came with the machine.

edit: Also, it's running OF 2.01 but for some reason refuses to recognize the reset-nvram command. Set-defaults and reset-all works ok though.

At any rate I went to do something to it, took the processor and HDD out, forgot to put them back in and plugged it in. When I plugged it back in the green light stayed on and refused to shut off. I unplugged it (not knowing I left the proc and hdd out) and threw them back in only to have it not boot, no green light nothing.

I threw the 4GB HD in it and ran the BOOT CDROM command in open firmware and turns out that the 4gig SOMEHOW booted Jaguar from that. So it's running Jaguar on the 4 gig (although it keeps defaulting to SUPER low brightness) At any rate it runs on the 4gig just fine and it's faster than my lombard was!

So now I KNOW this 20gig drive works just fine and everything, it's been verified and cleaned before shipping. So what's going on here?

1) You do know that OS X has to be on an 8-gig-or-less partition, and furthermore entirely within the first 8 gigs of the drive, right? The only exception, I believe, is if you use an external SCSI drive (WallStreets have an HDI SCSI port in back)

2) A MacOS X volume must be blessed differently for an old-world machine like the WallStreet. The OS X installer knows that and old-world blesses the volume during the installation process. But if you've used Carbon Copy Cloner or Retrospect or something akin to that to duplicate a bootable copy of OS X onto the drive, the WallStreet may not recognize it as having the right kind of boot blocks. Here is a command-line instruction that will bless an OS X installation for old-world boxes: sudo /usr/sbin/bless -device /dev/disk1s9 -label "'GiveDrive_aName'" -xcoff /usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.xcoff

3) OS 9 (or 8 for that matter, WallStreets can do 8) can be a pain to bless, too. Easy enough if you can boot OS 9 from some device  just navigate to the System Folder, yank the Finder out of it and then toss it back in. That resets the boot blocks. But doing all that under OS X doesn't seem to do anything of the sort. If you have a bootable OS 9 (or 8) CD, you can force the WallStreet to reset the system type to the old-fashioned systems by doing a power reset (fn-Control-Shift-Powerkey) and then boot while holding down the "C" key. Then do the Finder-yank trick as described above and reboot and see if it boots in 9.

BTW, this isn't precisely correct. You need XPostFacto to install Panther, but once it is installed you can select it from within OS 9's "Startup Disk" Control Panel and it will boot from Panther as readily as a more modern Mac. So you really only need XPostFacto for the duration of the installation, unless you're trying to boot from a device or partition (see above note about 8 gig partition size limit) that the WallStreet won't natively boot OS X from.

I ran Panther on a WallStreet for quite some time, intermittently switching to other operating systems also installed, and switching back, and never had to launch XPostFacto to do so.

1) You do know that OS X has to be on an 8-gig-or-less partition, and furthermore entirely within the first 8 gigs of the drive, right? The only exception, I believe, is if you use an external SCSI drive (WallStreets have an HDI SCSI port in back)

2) A MacOS X volume must be blessed differently for an old-world machine like the WallStreet. The OS X installer knows that and old-world blesses the volume during the installation process. But if you've used Carbon Copy Cloner or Retrospect or something akin to that to duplicate a bootable copy of OS X onto the drive, the WallStreet may not recognize it as having the right kind of boot blocks. Here is a command-line instruction that will bless an OS X installation for old-world boxes: sudo /usr/sbin/bless -device /dev/disk1s9 -label "'GiveDrive_aName'" -xcoff /usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.xcoff

3) OS 9 (or 8 for that matter, WallStreets can do 8) can be a pain to bless, too. Easy enough if you can boot OS 9 from some device  just navigate to the System Folder, yank the Finder out of it and then toss it back in. That resets the boot blocks. But doing all that under OS X doesn't seem to do anything of the sort. If you have a bootable OS 9 (or 8) CD, you can force the WallStreet to reset the system type to the old-fashioned systems by doing a power reset (fn-Control-Shift-Powerkey) and then boot while holding down the "C" key. Then do the Finder-yank trick as described above and reboot and see if it boots in 9.

Click to expand...

so what does this command line do and how do I use it? typing that into open firmware doesn't do much.

Well it looks like my only hope of getting this working is to throw the 20GB in the Lombard the girlfriend has and format it using that and putting jaguar on it and then putting that in the wallstreet. But given the track record of this machine I have no idea if even THAT will work.

Well well! I am posting from the Wallstreet on OSX 10.2.8! Yep I got it working. How? Well I just used the G3 Lombard that is now owned by my girlfriend, formatted and partitioned the drive (with the 8gb first partition that OSX installs to) and threw it in the wallstreet and it works! Wee!

Ok, I'm at my WITS END WITH THIS MACHINE. I've ABSOLUTELY HAD IT WITH THIS USELESS PIECE OF GARBAGE THAT APPLE CALLS A LAPTOP.

I just left it on last night after it successfully ran and booted Jaguar and it went to sleep, nothing unusual right? Well today I went to go wake it up (left it over girlfriend's house) and well it doesn't wake up. No problem, I just unplug it and plug it back in and it decided HAY GUYZ GUESS WHAT YUO DONT HAVE A STARTUP DISK LOL!!

I have a possessed Wallstreet still running stock config (233MHz, 2GB HDD, 96MB RAM)
I had the exact same issue a while back, where it would randomly lose the boot drive, and even fail to boot from CD. Resetting PRAM was always a crapshoot. Sometimes it would come out of its stupor, and sometimes not (I used the magic key-combination stenciled inside the back port door)

In the end, I narrowed it down to a dead/dying PRAM battery. The main LIon battery had long since crapped out, and the PRAM batt went shortly afterward.
The laptop would work *only* after leaving it plugged in while powered-down for several hours (which seemed to trickle-charge the PRAM battery enough to become sentient).
Running the laptop while plugged in was marginally successful.
If unplugged, it had ~30seconds of runtime before the machine would black out, and the hours o' recharging would again be necessary.
Replacement PRAM batteries can be had for ~$50 via the web. Installing them is a pain, since it's literally the heart of the machine, and its placement is duly inconvenient in the extreme. (though there are some good walkthroughs, complete with photos on the web)
In the end, I bought an iBook and kept the Wallstreet mostly for sentimental value.
Good luck!

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